Scribes of ancient world were pollsters of their day

In modern elections, pollsters have taken on an almost prophetic role.

Pollsters read the signs of the times with big data and pulse checks on public opinion to project imminent exchanges of power. But both prophets and pollsters share a common occupational risk: their respectability rests solely in the reliability of their predictions.

In the recent U.S. presidential election, Joe Biden won the presidency, but Donald Trump garnered far more votes than predicted. As in the 2016 election, projections by advance poll missed the mark. Further doubt has been cast on pollsters’ methods.

The reality is polling problems are nothing new. There is a controversial history of polling since the modern advent of this art and science in the 20th century. The back story of political projection by reading the numbers, however, has more ancient roots.

One of the more common mechanisms for reviewing and predicting history involved a simple yet profound numerical tool: counting to four. This technique for seeing the world came to influence ways of seeing and describing empires in surprisingly diverse contexts.

Readers of the biblical book of Daniel are familiar with the motif of counting to four. Characters in the book have multiple nightmares of four-tiered statues or four ferocious monsters, which interpreters later decode as referring to the rise and fall of four empires on the eve of expected divine delivery.

For the writers and readers of Daniel living under the oppressive thumb of empires in ancient Palestine in the centuries leading up to the common era, this meant rule by Babylon, Media, Persia and Greece.

Then the unthinkable happened. Some ancient Jewish groups anticipated the breaking dawn of liberation under divine rule starting in the mid-second century BCE. Instead, the oppression of Hellenistic rulers wore on until Roman warhorses crushed through the horizon in Palestine in 63 BCE. The metrics were misread, the prophecy missed the mark.

One of the earliest places we see recalculating predictions is in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This trove of nearly 1,000 fragmentary manuscripts penned or preserved by an ancient Jewish community between 150 BCE to 70 CE includes an Aramaic writing known as the “Four Kingdoms.”

In this text, a Jewish seer beholds four talking trees that disclose they represent four empires. Though the text is fragmentary, the scribe behind it seems to have conjured a different four kingdom count: BabylonPersia, Greece, Rome and the kingdom of God. In adapting this theme seen in the book of Daniel, he preserves continuity with the past while accounting for Rome — and sketching apocalyptic hopes for the imminent coming of the kingdom of God.

An open-access book I coedited with New Testament scholar Loren Stuckenbruck, Four Kingdom Motifs Before and Beyond the Book of Daniel, explores the spread of this strategy to read the past and write the future.

This project revealed that well beyond the days of Daniel and the Dead Sea Scrolls, this motif enabled communities to order the world around them and locate themselves on often tumultuous timelines.

For example, Old Testament scholar Ian Young reveals the earliest Greek translation of the book of Daniel (included in the translation of Hebrew scriptures known as the Septuagint) may have included a fifth kingdom to account for the phases of Hellenistic rule following the conquest of Alexander the Great and the divided domains in his wake.

Tools for developing political projections and making a claim on the world may endure over time, but missing the mark in political speculation is nothing new.

When contexts change, we are forced to revisit the metrics used to account for the unexpected present.

The history of overturning and re-imagining empires through religious motifs should give us pause for reflection. The history of the exchanges and evolution of empire is ongoing. Its effects are something we’re only beginning to understand.